Slashdot Mirror
Windows Phone 7 Hits Technical Preview Milestone
suraj.sun writes "Microsoft's upcoming Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system has today reached its biggest milestone yet, with a technical preview announced placing the OS on the 'home stretch' to launch. 'We are certainly not done yet — but the craftsmen (and women) of our team have signed off that our software is now ready for the hands-on everyday use of a broad set of consumers around the world — and we're looking forward to their feedback in the coming weeks, so that we can finish the best Windows Phone release ever together,' Terry Myerson, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Windows Phone Engineering, wrote tonight." There's coverage around the net including
CNet,
NeoWin and
Engadget.
Is this a release that, purely on quality/merit (let's not talk about mindshare or openness -- presumably both are lost causes), is at all competitive with the alternatives?
In a sense it's amazing to me, given how much longer Microsoft's been trying to get something done in the Mobile arena, that they have been completely unable to gain any traction so far. Were Windows CE etc. trying too hard to be compatible with Desktop Windows? I don't know, but it's baffling that a company with so much of a headstart over would now be its chief competitors managed so little.
It's hard to point to openness as the reason with Apple's walled garden as a ready counterpoint, but what did go wrong?
No, it's just Outlook. (Files can synch.) You get a wierd error with 64-bit activesync with 64-bit office; it doesn't work!
To be fair, the Zune could've been a success had MS not screwed it up. The hardware was actually quite good and the few people I know that owned them really liked them.
Microsoft will be enforcing content restrictions on Windows Phone 7 applications, by preventing users from sideloading applications as they previously had done with Windows Mobile. This results in all applications having to pass through the Windows Phone Marketplace where content restrictions apply.[34][35] Users are free to sync whatever content they want to their phone or view any website from the web browser.
Microsoft said that applications containing pornography will be prevented from being installed on Windows Phone 7, as well as applications containing images that fit the definition of "sexually suggestive". Violence and all nudity will be censored from apps. Suggestions or depictions of prostitution, sexual fetishes, or basically anything that "a reasonable person would consider to be adult or borderline adult content" will be forbidden from Windows Phone 7 apps.
Microsoft elaborated that it would disallow apps containing "images that reveal nipples, genitals, buttocks, or pubic hair".
When will the US understand that sex is not bad, evil or something that should be banned from adults? Of course, the games with violence and killing will be allowed, but no, not such unharmful and natural thing like nudity or sex.
I don't know, but it's baffling that a company with so much of a headstart over would now be its chief competitors managed so little.
The thing is, they never had a head start at all - because they were always going down a different path. It's not so much compatibility with Desktop WIndows, as it was reliance on a stylus and a physical keyboard.
Android and iOS were built from the ground up to make use of touch. Neither iOS or Android (to some extent) are reliant even on a physical keyboard, though one can be present... for small mobile devices that simply is a better path, and one Microsoft never chose to explore.
So it's not so much Desktop compatibility, as it is trying to simply move the existing UI conventions to mobile (unless that is what you meant by compatibility).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
...run Linux? :)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Microsoft ascended to supremacy because the PC was in a niche where IBM was irrelevant, and further was more important to a larger segment of the population than the segment that cared about IBM's dominance -- large computers and servers. IBM was never displaced from their market and Microsoft will never be displaced from the desktop. And now history is repeating itself. The iPhone and Android are in a niche where Microsoft, like IBM before it, is irrelevant. And honestly I haven't seen an effort to get into a market this feeble since since Atari released the Jaguar.
This is ultimately a good thing. Microsoft can only seem to do interoperability when they don't have a monopoly. Portable devices will destroy IE's ability to ever set the tone for the web again. Considering the damage they have done to the progress of the web their fall is something to celebrate.
And yes, scads of IE dependent corp machines will remain for years to come. The web will move on. Truth be known the inability of IE 6 to deal with highly interactive sites will be seen as a benefit by CEO's since employees won't be "playing" on the clock. That's fine though - the rest of us can move on.
My guess is that the thing that will kill this device (like most MS devices that have to compete in a market they haven't cornered), is the fact that by the time the management, sales, and the lawyer teams get done "improving" the device, you won't be able to do anything on it without having to pay through the nose. Repeatedly. Forever.
So, even if the device ends up being a marvel of technology (which seems unlikely given the MS mobile paradigm), it will end up being locked behind a walled garden, which is locked up in a castle, surrounded by a moat, filled with alligators, etc. Sorry, couldn't resist a little hyperbole.
Pornography is not created as "art". Its sole purpose is for people to look at it and then self-abuse themselves into a climax. That is not sex. Sex requires two people.
Because multiple people never watch pornography together, right?
It's fine that you prefer to have a puritanical worldview, but let's not pretend it's held by everyone or in some way rationally based.
From http://www.zdnet.com/blog/cell-phones/microsoft-windows-phone-7-technical-preview-a-definitive-guide/4286?pg=8&tag=mantle_skin;content
Windows Phone 7 is a huge departure for the smartphone group at Microsoft and takes quite a radical approach to the way people use their phones. Unlike the iPhone, Google Android, and Palm webOS, WP7 is not focused on the application experience, but is centered on helping you interact with the people you want to and complete the tasks you need to complete with apps mainly working in the background or having other technologies (like Bing Search) do better at meeting your needs without more apps.
The current experience is amazingly stable and fluid and I am quite impressed with what they have done. It has taken some time and they were pretty much out of competing for customers for most of this year, but it looks like they will come out firing with all they have this coming holiday season.
Reading slashdot one-liner: (irm http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot).rdf.item | fl title,desc*
while that might be true with RIM, RIM is probably quite happy to be _the_ enterprise messaging phone and the last time I looked, RIM made a good profit. Microsoft on the other hand, loses hundreds of millions annually on Windows CE based products and has since the late '90s. And there is nothing wrong with a company being good at their market and being good enough their products are _picked_ over the competition.
.NET was and is designed to tie vendors to Windows instead of having platform choices which Java provides.
Microsoft does not see things this way. They must own the market and they are willing to spend billions to do that and they have. Profits from Windows desktop based software( WIndows OS, MS Office, and Windows Server ) make up ~90% of Microsoft profits. Microsoft execs live and breath by the now infamous "Does anybody remember Windows?" statement Bill Gates made in the mid '90s when Microsoft product managers and engineers were crafting Microsoft's Java product list. That statement and the following directives from Bill and other executives turned Microsofts Java products into products whos purpose was to tie customers to Windows, not enable Microsoft to compete for customers and profits. They already had the profits from Windows and losing those profits are more important than winning new profits. IMO
And Adobe would be a fool to put any effort, funded or not, into putting Flash on a Microsoft phone product. Microsoft may not have dissed Adobe like Apple did but their Silverlight is directly targeting Flash just as
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
I hated Windows Mobile more than I've hated any version of Windows OSs.
Words cannot describe what an absolute pile of garbage that was.
I would rather have tent stakes driven through my eyeballs than spend money on a Windows OS for mobile.
I would rather sit on a cactus doused in sulfuric acid than use Windows Mobile.
I would rather watch The Phantom Menace on repeat for a month while covered in bees and spiders.
I would rather have been given a writing credit for Battlefield Earth.
I would rather be in a relationship with Mel Gibson than use Windows Mobile.
Worst of all, I think I'd rather sign a lifetime contract to use a Kin.
"Microsoft = drawing you in to cook you slowly"? Most consumers still have no clue but what they do have a clue about is that Apple made a phone/PDA sexy and you are _in_ if you have one. It helps too that they are easy to use and work well( except if you hold the 4 a certain way ). Android brings the easy to use UI to a plethora of devices which don't have the Apple cool factor but has the easy to use and is useful but it also brings customers to all the other hardware vendors with very little upfront costs for the OS/software.
And those hardware vendors know what it is like in the PC and netbook segment where Microsoft is threatening them and dictating product development and marketing and they do not want any part of that. This is why Windows Phone 7 will fail. No matter how much they offer companies to sell Windows Phone 7, they will not be able to pull exclusionary and exclusive deals like they did with netbooks and PCs and because of that, there is no sexy in Windows. In the end, only Microsoft zealots will purchase Windows Phone 7 phones and a handful of business managers will dictate to staff to use only those phones "because they are a Windows shop".
What's worst, at a time when Microsoft's investors are wondering where the growth has gone, Microsoft will have to pump hundreds of millions quarterly into just marketing this thing and it'll show up on the books. Not to mention the hundreds of millions Microsoft is probably already starting to pump into the tablet segment attempting to not only stem ARM Linux or Android based tablets but also iPad growth. I don't see the 4th quarter looking good at all for Microsoft investors. Desktop Windows, MS Office, and Windows Server will still make them billions, but once again, billions in losses and no indication of success outside of Windows will pull down the stock even further. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
What exactly is it that makes nudity so bad?
It's not that nudity is so bad, it's what happens when kids are exposed to porn that people are concerned with. Kids have raging hormones that operate whether they are prepared for the consequences or not. And by consequences i dont mean teen pregnancy (kids who are getting some at that age are probably not downloading porn apps on their phones). The problem is that porn presents sexuality in its most mechanical form. No love, no personal relationship, just rubbing. Women are presented as easy and submissive. They do what they are told, and don't seem to need anything more than a man in the room to be ready and willing to do whatever the man wants. Young men are obviously not going to assume that all women are as slutty as the "characters" in a porn vid, but they cannot hope to understand how women actually feel about and have sex by watching porn. Parents and schools are the last places kids turn to when it comes to sex, and by the time they actually see a real nude person in their bedroom, they've probably seen thousands of digital ones there for years.
And that's just the boys. Consider how a porno makes most girls feel. They see women doing things that the average adult would stutter to explain. Almost all of the women they see are submissive and objectified (that may be something some women are into, but they don't show the woman negotiating her contract or explaining what she will or wont do). So-called "soft" porn or skinimax flix are a little more sensitive to the female psyche, but they are less and less common. (Check out how many of these series are on vs how many websites there are dedicated to the more damaging "slutty" porn).
I am not against images of nudity or even porn for adults (watch it myself from time to time...). But to ask with incredulity why people are so concerned with nudity is to ignore the fact that kids are NOT adults. They are not prepared to deal with the condensed and distorted view of sexuality that porn presents.
Nudity is not the issue. It's the developing psyche of children that people are concerned with.
PS: For the record, i am not religious at all so i am not coming at this from a moralistic point-of-view. I simply have a young daughter who's well-being is my top priority in life, so i think about this stuff a lot.
Hah! I see you've never heard of the Bechdel Test. Almost all modern media inherently promotes a surprisingly patriarchal view of women; they're either the token girl, or talking to men, or talking about men - it's basically all about the guys. Even supposed "chick flicks", despite in theory being about women, generally have female characters whose sole purpose in life is to give the lead woman someone to talk to about the lead man.
And these are the things we show children; almost no Disney movie, for instance, will pass the test.
Given that sort of insidious bullshit, porn is refreshingly straight to the point.
I think that's precisely the problem with WP7.
For those with WM background, it kills off all the features that were liked (by some) in WM. A lot of people liked it for being extensible (apps etc) and hackable. For example, wireless hotspot functionality, just added to Android, was on WM years ago. Multitasking, copy-paste - if, in 2005, you'd tell a WM user that he would not find them on a smartphone released in two years, he'd laugh in your face. And some - like you? - even liked the stylus-driven interface, because that allows smaller controls, and therefore more information displayed on the screen at once.
The other, broader category is people coming from Android and, especially, iPhone. Their first question will be, "so what does it do better". And I don't see anything really compelling in that department. The UI is fairly different, which may prove to be easier to use (I don't have any definite opinion, and it's hard to make any objective conclusions until you get a chance to hold and use an actual phone with it - emulator is unhelpful there), but that's about it. All other features are available elsewhere, and there are more of them, too, even in traditionally feature-limited iPhone. The only point which may affect things, and on which there is no clarity yet, is how the app landscape will look like. Which leads us to the next thing.
WP7 development tools are good and easy to use; subjectively more so than on any other mobile platform with the possible exception of WM (it would be very surprising if that wasn't true...). But restricting it to .NET apps only, and then also to verifiable subset of CIL (meaning: no C/C++, not even compiled to CIL), means that developers are rather limited in what they can do compared to iOS or Android. Portability and cross-platform code reuse? Forget it. APIs, too - there's decent coverage of UI-related stuff, but pretty much everything else is unimpressive.
It might be that the sheer ease and cost of development (VS Phone Express is free, and unlike Xcode you don't need a Mac - which most people don't have - to run it) will be enough to generate enough developer interest to get a good kickstart for the app store... but it's all a very big if.